Home Glossary Aggregate Data Aggregate Data The A-Z of Privacy Aggregate Data: Aggregate data is a data summary where the values of a number of rows are grouped together to form a single value, such as an average salary per department, or a sum of all sales across a category. Since they don’t identify any one individual, such data aggregates may, at first sight, look safe to publish. But statistical summaries can be vulnerable to reconstruction or differencing attacks, which allow an attacker to identify individuals by making multiple queries or comparing different released sets of aggregate data. Differential privacy is one protection against such risks. Return to glossary
